Thank you, Kunio Kato

The major highlight of last night's 81st Oscars, certainly the most impressive acceptance speech in any case, came from Japanese filmmaker Kunio Kato, who took the award for Best Animated Short for 'La Maison en Petits Cubes.' Future winners may want to accept some coaching from this guy. With great concision and deadpan delivery the man managed to invoke the spirit of Styx at their most pop-savvy and thank an inanimate object, which in itself much surely constitute some sort of precedent. "Thank you, my pencil... Thank you, animation... Domo arigato, Mister Roboto..." So much more charming than the weirdly superior-sounding A.R. Rahman, who won in both the Song and Score categories and talked about how all his life he chose love over hate. I mean, what the hell does that mean?   

Anyway, considering the frustrating number of overt snubs and the ratio of genuine excellence to blandness that clogged the nominees this year, I unreservedly applaud this renovated approach to the acting categories that has five past winners come on stage and introduce each of the nominees personally, bestowing equal attention on all and taking undue emphasis away from the winner (the selection of which does so often feel like the result of a popularity contest even when the nominations sometimes convey a greater sense of adventure and observational powers on the part of the academy). Having the quintet of warm assessors play their parts made these individual moments feel far more intimate and less catty. They imparted (like Penelope Cruz's gorgeous 60-year-old gown and her heartfelt nod to Pedro Almodóvar's role in her career development) a deeper sense of tradition, and made more transparent the essence of what these awards are, or at least should be, really about, which is peer acknowledgment, a sense of community, and a love of the art. The results were far more moving than is normally the case. And Whoopi Goldberg was actually really funny! 

Of course we didn't get to see Werner Herzog win an Oscar, but I certainly can't complain about Man on Wire's taking Best Documentary or Philippe Petit's hugely enjoyable showing off. And even if I didn't feel that either The Reader or Slumdog Millionaire represented their best work, it was actually satisfying to see Kate Winslet and Anthony Dod Mantle get justly rewarded. All in all, it made the twenty minutes I spent fiddling with my rabbit ears more than worth the effort. 

Man on Wire: Trespassing as sublime art

On the overcast morning of August 7, 1974, New Yorkers lucky enough to have been passing below the twin towers of the World Trade Center bore witness to a genuinely singular event. Philippe Petit had ascended into the clouds for a walk, or rather a dance. The calendars of he and his accomplices were marked on that day with the word “coup.” Disguised, carrying much equipment, and having to constantly evade security, they’d snuck up to the rooftops the night before, strung their wire between the towers, and as the day began Petit, with a focus that's just unfathomable to me, inhabited the largely intangible performance space they’d created for about 45 minutes, dazzling onlookers, merrily taunting police.

They were all arrested, of course, charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. But the trespassing strikes me as essential to the nature of the feat. It needed to be unsanctioned, unexpected, a sort of vision nurtured clandestinely. Petit was sent in for psychiatric evaluation, but no mental illness could be established. The reporters asked Petit why he did it, and obviously there could be no satisfactory answer. In ‘On the High Wire,’ his essay on Petit, Paul Auster writes: “The desire is at once far-fetched and perfectly natural, and the appeal of it, finally, is its utter uselessness. No art, it seems to me, so clearly emphasizes the deep aesthetic impulse inside us all.” Indeed, the purity of the act is somehow its most potent element.

The event, the most grandiose and publicized in a life of similar feats, is the subject of James Marsh’s extraordinary Man on Wire. Marsh’s documentary—and caper movie of sorts—isn’t a point-by-point biographical profile of Petit. (March also has the grace to never make overt something best felt, the fact that recalling this event gives us back the WTC, not as a site of trauma and terror, but one of awe and inspiration.) Rather, Marsh focuses each moment of Man on Wire exclusively on the event’s painstaking preparations—which necessarily include Petit’s previous wire-walks across the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and those of Sydney Harbour Bridge—and its immediate aftermath. And Marsh had the good fortune to have chosen a subject that was well documented: Petit and his friends shot a lot of terrific footage of their work-in-progress and of the coup itself.

Perhaps even more importantly, Marsh was fortunate to have a superb storyteller in Petit himself, still elfin, animated, a strawberry-maned Petit Prince, still deeply charismatic, not to mention his cohorts, including his articulate, passionate technical mastermind Jean-Louis Blondeau, and Petit’s girlfriend at the time Annie Allix. As Allix, with great sincerity, explains how upon meeting Petit, “it was quite clear that I had to follow his [destiny],” Marsh nicely juxtaposes her spoken testimony with images of her actually shadowing Petit on the wire, a moving evocation of a young woman surrendering completely to love.

Still, for those of us who’ve never witnessed anything like it, the build-up to the event, which roughly consumes the first two-thirds of Man on Wire, though exciting, can feel sort of abstract. It’s only when we begin to see the actual images, and even more so when we see and hear the intensely emotional testimonies regarding that day, that we are all helplessly caught up in the sublimity of the act, which bypasses audacity and becomes something that penetrates a universal desire to live more rigorously. And it also becomes clear in the film’s final section that Petit’s seemingly weightless passage over Lower Manhattan, the fulfillment of an elaborate, un-repeatable dream, was also a passage into another life altogether, a moment in which, inevitably, everything changed for everyone involved. This moment unfolds as something beautiful, overwhelming, and, in all those trailing-off sentences, something very painful. We should all be so lucky as to feel something like it sometime in our lives.